The Art of the Public Wank
Ah, I had forgotten the pleasures of watching some guy publicly wank, and Matt McCormick drops his pants for us:
Tuesday, January 16, 2007, 8:15 PM ( Read more... )
Tuesday, January 16, 2007, 8:15 PM ( Read more... )
I should do one of these critiques of deist wankery, but the atheists have it fairly well covered. The claim that "man cannot behave morally without belief in God" is another version of the Santa=God style "implied bitch slap," if you think about it. It's a way to impugne the character of the opposition without taking responsibility for your slander.
A friend of mine put me onto Matt, and although I enjoyed the link, my friend got quite angry when I berated him for parking his own superior brain in order to quote this (funny though he is) wankmaster. I'm still a little bruised from his reply. I think this God/~God stuff is just too serious to discuss with people in the abstract; they end up angry and hurt. Just because it's recreational to me doesn't mean it isn't dead serious to the rest of the world, apparently.
Knowing that risk, alas, Matt is too good not to share. If you enjoyed his presentation of the Santa God thing, you will love:
http://atheismblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/open-floodgates.html
The device where he maneuvers us into false dichotomies is very nice, if old hat, but the diagrams are wonderful. Kind of powerpoint atheist Jack Chick - the glowering cartoon of the thinker in a wife-beater tee is totally adorable! We are rooting for him, oh no! He has abandoned Reason, and how now has to believe in all those religions with strange names involving tin can worship1 or goat-sex! Oh no, little man! Don't forsake reason! You will be lost, we yell, LOST!
It's like the part in the horror movie where you scream at the screen, "DON'T GO DOWN INTO THE DARK BASEMENT WITHOUT TURNING ON THE LIGHTS! THERE'S A SERIAL KILLER LOOSE!!"
1Me, I want to know which of our choices - Baal, Acchupta, Ryangombe, Pu’gu, Pen Annwen, Orcus, Orunmila, Nintinugga, Ningirama, Montu, Mahamanasika, Kamrusepa, Haumiatiketike, or Hatdastsisi - allows post-modern burnt sacrifice of pop culture items, such as junk food and ironic tee shirts. I am all over that one. I even know where in my yard the altar will be.
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The creation of so many receptacles/disciplines for managing one's faith rises out of the incredible diversity of individual perception of the metaphysical/inexplicable aspects of this mortal coil. Every person on this earth of a certain level of cognitive awareness may have a natural perception of this world that includes rationalizations of the mysterious and unprovable parts. What they do with it may include (*) giving it up to a dogma that explains/manages it, or (**) earnestly attempting to suss it out for themselves. In between these points of departure, and outside of them, are mashups of both (*) and (**). Into each and both categories fall atheists, theists, confused people, and sure people.
The only thing that unites us all is that none of us knows anything for sure.
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Yep. And what divides us is the degree to which the universe still makes sense if we have no hope of making all of it knowable.
The more deeply-committed Christians and Atheists I meet, the more I am convinced they share an important personality trait: the need to feels the universe is ultimately knowable. That if we had enough time and resources, the mind of man would be able to comprehend everything.
It's not a weakness, just a different way to be? Like some people have more need for achievement or more tolerance for pain, etc. It also makes people who aren't as motivated look bananas to thme?
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Hmmm. I had to think about this a bit, because it's not my experience. I've known a few truly and deeply committed Christians in my time, my parents among them, and, with my mother at least, she felt there were unknowable areas that had to be assigned to faith. This is mostly how I feel, too, (and felt growing up) except, I can let go of the need to codify my faith now (and hope to be able to let that go fully someday). My daddy, I think, did desire for it all to make sense, as well as for his conviction to be proven correctin real time. So he could bask a bit, I suspect. I'm pretty sure he had a few crises of faith, which is totally normal for intelligent people of all stripes, but which religion frowns on expressing too loudly. Bottom line, yes, he wanted it to make sense.
The only atheistic person I know really well is my husband, and he has almost always taken a powder when I'm discussing religion. He was raised by Protestants, churchgoers, who are bewildered that he never took Jesus to heart. He never expresses the desire to be sure there is no God. He doesn't think about it much at all, I think. He believes, to the best I've ever been able to figure, that when it's over, it's over. I wonder if he would feel that way if he had already lost his parents, or if I had died 10 years ago. He has never called me stupid for believing in God, just has said he doesn't understand my belief. I have never understood his unbelief, but i get closer with time.
As for me thinking he's bananas because he's not motivated to be more inquiring, well, i confess to thinking that way in the past. But i also believed back then that there would come a day, or at least a moment, wherein all this life and what was to come after it would make sense. I don't anymore, but it's been a very hard transition for me.
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A number of fundamentalist atheists and Christians I have met seem to be morally offended by divergent opinions on their beliefs. I have been called stupid and sniped at by both parties for failing to see it their way, and this baffles me. I think this is one reason I spend so much time pondering this stuff?
I can sort of understand the fundamentalist atheists feeling that it isn't sensible to believe in the ineffable, especially those who have never experienced it, but if I am a lost soul, shouldn't that be Christian catnip? If I fail to believe the Bible literally at the peril of my soul, shouldn't I be in need of conversion?
Also, why does the serious atheist get angry at my not seeing it his/her way, and how did we get from there to blaming all the world's ills on religion? Consider the men who have become quasi-celebrities claiming religion is evil? How can it be evil, when evil is a religious concept, when the terrible actions of certain churches can and have been as easily done by other forms of temporal governance?
He has never called me stupid for believing in God, just has said he doesn't understand my belief.
Well, see, that seems a more reasonable approach to me.
I guess it looks to be as if filing all you cannot ever know under God's will is a way to allow someone to know the entire universe, even it you personally can't. Now we see through a glass darkly, then, face to face. So if I want to know the entire universe, and I am a Christian, I can wait until I get to Heaven, be joined with God, and He's the ultimate knower of things. It tamps the universe down, makes sure that everything is ultimately knowable, that there is no fact left unknown. The hairs on my head, not a sparrow falls, I knew you before you were born, etc. There is an urge for knowledge completion, to cover the big everything. Am I thinking about this wrong?
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Do you want them to convert you?
I guess it looks to be as if filing all you cannot ever know under God's will is a way to allow someone to know the entire universe, even it you personally can't. Now we see through a glass darkly, then, face to face. So if I want to know the entire universe, and I am a Christian, I can wait until I get to Heaven, be joined with God, and He's the ultimate knower of things. It tamps the universe down, makes sure that everything is ultimately knowable, that there is no fact left unknown. The hairs on my head, not a sparrow falls, I knew you before you were born, etc. There is an urge for knowledge completion, to cover the big everything.
Now, see, this is how my mother reasoned it out. She assigned it to her theology of choice. I'll plug in at the Episcopal receptacle and charge my battery. I don't mean to say she checked her brain at the church door, she didn't. I fondly remember Muh and Daddy's after church critiques of the sermon (before he went into the priesthood) as being very probing, and making a lot of sense to me from both points of view. Because Daddy wanted to win more, he did. Like I say, he was one who wanted to be first in line to see Mrs. Train, so he could turn to the other kids and they could get the scoop from him. When my oldest sister went all agnostic on him when she turned 16, I began to see this trait clearly in him. He started to become a bit rigid. I think there was also fear involved.
I've only known fundy atheists in the blogosphere and in the greater media, but, yes, the loudest-mouthed among them just can't see that huge beam in their own eye. The style of atheism my husband owns is probably more of being stirred and moved by something, but attributing it not to God, but to the entity itself, or a resonance within. Simple, uncomplicated. Appreciating the thing itself, or the moment. When I first lived with him, my religion went to live in a small town in Alabama, and i was a "natural" Christian/God-lover for years. Simple, uncomplicated. When I went back to church, I felt so much turmoil and outright heartache that I could no longer say, Oh, yeah, that's what it say in the Gospels, so it must be true." I felt like a failure, and, if i had been honest with all these earnest, judgmental people about my true beliefs, they would have agreed that I was. Ironically, I feel like, whatever God is, it's not judging me by those criteria.
So, no, you're not going about it wrong, to my way of thinking. But what do i know? I'm either damned or stupid...
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